The present disclosure relates generally to the distribution of digital content, and more particularly to an information handling system for the distribution of digital content.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As the average home becomes increasingly digital and households continue to expand in the number of IHSs in the home, there has been a growing desire to share and distribute digital content among these IHSs. This content includes television feeds, digital photos, music and/or a variety of other multi-media content. Television feeds may also vary greatly in nature—for example, they may be live, recorded, time-shifted, protected with operator-specific encryption (as in the case of pay-per-view and premium channels), and so on. Modern television feeds have also increased in their level of interactivity with the inclusion of, for example, electronic programming guides and embedded interactive features such as, for example, Java or web-links.
One group trying to address this need is the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), a cross-industry collection of consumer electronics, computing, and mobile device manufacturers creating an interoperability standard for their devices to allow for ease of sharing content (http://www.dlna.org). However, the standard is primarily focused on the sharing of personal user content (e.g., content typically found on a personal computer) and does not address the needs of many digital content providers.
For digital content providers (e.g., cable television service operators, satellite television service operators, etc.), it is desirable to equip and enable customers to distribute their content within their homes to multiple end user platforms and systems. This includes the initial set up of the infrastructure, as well as the provision of administration and maintenance. It is also desirable to improve the scalability of infrastructure to allow the easy addition of more content providers and end devices.
Traditionally, in the area of television service operators, each display device requires a physical connection to the operator's signal. This is normally handled by the use of signal splitters and amplifiers (e.g., the operator sends a signal through fiber cable to a neighborhood where the signal is split to multiple households, and the operator signal coming into a household may be split and routed to each room having a television). Techniques such as these lead to signal degradation, increased installation costs, and an increased number of customer calls. Additionally, consumers wishing to view digital content on these displays typically must acquire an external set-top box that is typically rented out by the service operator (one set-top box per display). These set-top boxes extract the digital content from the RF signal supplied to the households, decrypt the signal as permitted by the user's subscription, and output results to a single television. The presence of the set-top boxes leads to added costs to the operators in the forms of administration (e.g., tracking, inventory, etc.), installation (e.g., service trips into the field to install, analyzing of signal degradation to ensure digital content can still be extracted, etc.), and maintenance (e.g., repairs, replacements, etc.) of the set-top boxes.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide for improved acquisition, storage, and distribution of digital content.